Yesterday, Joe Sudbay took a look at the first campaign finance report in the Maine marriage campaign that was released yesterday and found out that national Religious Right groups were dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the fight.
Today, the Lewiston Sun Journal took a look as well and concluded that “the group hoping to overturn Maine’s same-sex marriage law has out-raised the measure’s proponents by more than two to one”:
Stand for Maine Marriage, the group leading the effort for repeal, raised a total of about $343,000 from nine donors as of July 5, the end of the reporting period.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland contributed $100,000, the Knights of Columbus of Washington, D.C., chipped in $50,000 and Focus on the Family, a Christian group based in Colorado Springs, Colo., donated $31,000 to the political action committee seeking to repeal the gay marriage law.
Nearly half of the group’s fundraising, $160,000, came from the National Organization for Marriage, a New Jersey-based group established in 2007 “in response to the growing need for an organized opposition to same-sex marriage in state legislatures,” according to its Web site.
While Stand for Marriage raised more than $340,000, Maine Freedom to Marry raised about $138,000 – but the amazing thing is that of the donations brought in by Freedom to Marry, $80,000 came from residents of Maine.
Guess how much of the money raised by Stand for Marriage came from Maine residents?
The campaign finance report also shows four Maine citizens contributed a total of $400 to the cause.
$400? That means that, out of the total amount raised, the amount donated by actual residents of Maine to the effort constituted a whopping .1%, whereas the amount donated by Religious Right groups like NOM and FOF made up the other 99.9%.
I can’t wait to see how this right-wing effort manages to spin this and produce ad claiming to speak on behalf of Mainers who want to protect “traditional marriage” considering that actual residents of the state don’t seem to support the effort at all.
